By James Langton

(January 12 – 16:55 ET) – Actively managed exchange-traded funds may be coming to the U.S., The Investment News is reporting.

ETFs debuted in German in November. Now the paper is reporting a confidential application has been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to bring the product to North America.

Although the SEC refused to talk about the application, The Investment News points to unnamed sources at the American Stock Exchange as the source of the story. Amex has been the leader in listing ETFs in the U.S.

The SEC is reportedly concerned about these products, fearing that it could cause investors to begin day trading the funds, and doubting the managers’ ability to offer full, real-time portfolio disclosure.

“Actively managed ETFs can be done provided the managers are willing to reveal what’s in the fund every day,” says Nathan Most, chairman and president of Barclays ETFs, who created ETFs at the Amex in the early 1990s. He suggests a simple solution to disclosing actively-managed portfolios would be to limit trading to once a day.

“I think you would have to limit trading to a certain time of day, and you could disclose the portfolio over the Internet,” says Kevin McNally, an analyst with Salomon Smith Barney in New York. “I don’t see what the problem is.”

Tom Taggart, managing director at Barclays Global Investors in San Francisco, says, “We certainly see them coming down the road, eventually. But unless someone is able to get through the SEC quicker, we don’t see a U.S. actively managed ETF coming out for a couple of years.”